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Saturday, February 5, 2011

Tonight at the at the Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library on the USC campus, the USC Libraries held an awards banquet to present their 23rd annual Scripter Awards, given to film adaptations and presented
to both the screenwriter and the author of the original work.The evening was hosted by Nancy Sinatra. DGA President, filmmaker and USC alumnus Taylor Hackford (‘67, International
Relations) and his wife Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren served as
honourary dinner chairs.

To nobody's surprise, the Scripter Awards went to the writers of The Social Network, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and Ben Mezrich, author of the book “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.” I've mentioned before that this is not a true adaptation, that the screenplay for The Social Network was written concurrently with the book “The
Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money,
Genius and Betrayal” and Sorkin claims he didn't consult
it.

The other finalists had been the writers for The Ghost Writer, 127 Hours,True Grit and Winter's Bone. They were chosen from 73 eligible scripts. Leonard Maltin introduced the films and their writers with a clip that showed a portion of the book followed by a scene from the resulting movie. He then announced the winning team.

The 2010 Scripter Literary Achievement Award went to Dennis Lehane, who unfortunately wasn't able to attend. He wrote the original novels that became the films Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island and previously won a Scripter Award in 2004 for Mystic River. He now teaches at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.